After months of quiet, Perplexity’s CEO steps into the OpenClaw moment |
After months of quiet, Perplexity’s CEO steps into the OpenClaw moment
Welcome to Eye on AI, with AI reporter Sharon Goldman. In this edition: Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas talks to Fortune about the company’s new OpenClaw-like Computer…AI politics gets messy as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis leans into AI skepticism, seeking a contrast with Vance…Mistral AI lands Accenture as its latest big partner…AI complicates old internet privacy risks.
A few weeks ago, AI watchers began to notice something odd: Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, once among the most social-media-savvy executives in the AI world, had gone unusually quiet. The silence stood out at a moment when agent-style tools like Claude Code, Codex, and the viral open-source OpenClaw were dominating the conversation. Perplexity—long positioned as an AI-powered “answer engine” and a Google Search challenger—seemed conspicuously on the sidelines. Some even began to wonder whether the company had lost its way.
But Perplexity wasn’t lost, according to Srinivas—it was just busy building. I spoke with him yesterday, shortly after the company launched Computer, its attempt to turn today’s powerful but intimidating agent tools into something closer to a shared digital workspace that non-experts can actually use. The product is currently available only to Perplexity Max subscribers, with a broader rollout to Pro and Enterprise users planned in the coming weeks.
To my ear, Computer sounds like an OpenClaw for everyone else. Tools like OpenClaw often run on a separate machine, such as a Mac mini, with deep access to files and settings. Perplexity’s approach keeps that work in the cloud instead—letting users hand off tasks like research, writing, or coding to a tool that works for hours or even months, without giving an AI full control over any personal device.
The defining feature of Computer is also that it isn’t tied to one AI model. Different parts of a task can be routed to whichever model does them best—it currently orchestrates 19 models on the backend, including Claude Opus 4.6 for orchestration and coding tasks, Google Gemini for deep research, Google Nano Banana for images, Google Veo 3.1 for video, xAI’s Grok for speed in lightweight tasks, and ChatGPT 5.2 for long-context recall and wide search.
“When you build a team, you don’t build a homogenous group where everyone has the same skills,” Srinivas told me. “You build a team with diverse strengths. We’re applying that same logic to AI workflows. The orchestration is the product. The model is a tool.”
That model-agnostic stance is not new for Perplexity. Srinivas said more........